Krugman on income inequality

Michael reprints here Paul Krugman's recent opinion piece on income inequality.  Underneath Krugman's usual partisan invective about "right-wing commentators", "whin[ing]" conservatives, and "inequality's apologists" comes the charge that "misleading" statistics about income inequality are flying around.  Indeed, they are -- in this map, for example, which has been flying around and hotly debated in the blogosphere of late.  It appears to be Krugman's view that to question the value to informed discourse of inaccurate claims about declining incomes is to "whine" or "apolog[ize]" for inequality.  This is too bad.  It seems fair to ask if Krugman -- obviously a very gifted and intelligent scholar -- has any objections to the use of "misleading" statistics when they serve his purpose.

Let's stipulate, as I did earlier, that it should be a matter of serious concern -- to Americans generally, and to Catholics committed to principles of solidarity and a preferential option for the poor -- if the economic growth during the Bush Administration has worked to the benefit of only a very few Americans or if, notwithstanding this growth, working-class and low-income people are worse off than they were before.  I wrote earlier:

[W]e might conclude that, even the full picture of the economy (i.e., one that factors in real compensation, [etc.]) is troubling, perhaps because of the disparity between those at the top and the bottom.  (See these old MOJ posts on income inequality.)  We might think that even real, total compensation is too low, and failing to keep pace with American workers' increased productivity.  And so on.

Now, we can all agree that the new Krugman piece, in Michael's post, raises a number of important and timely questions.  For example, let's assume it is true that the "effective federal tax rate on the richest 0.01 percent has fallen from about 60 percent in 1980 to about 34 percent today."  What should we make of this?  What would be the effect -- on the economy generally and, of course, on the most vulnerable among us, with whose welfare I take it Catholic Social Thought charges us to be most concerned -- of raising the effective rate back to, say, 60%?  Or, is it right-wing "whin[ing]," or "apologis[m]" for inequality, to ask such questions?